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Sunday, October 28, 2018

LOS ANGELES – Moments after he’d put one last baseball into play, watched that fly, then stayed just long enough to ensure Max Muncy completed his journey, Ted Barrett, the plate umpire for Game 3 of the World Series, was offered for his first meal in many hours the choice of steak or fish.

“I had both,” he said.

Not 15 hours later, he was again in a room behind the Dodgers dugout with his five crewmates.

In case you’re curious to know what it feels like to umpire a seven-hour baseball game….

Friday, October 26, 2018

In an unprecedented move, the NFL has let one of its game officials go in the middle of the season.

First reported by FootballZebras.com, NFL down judge Hugo Cruz has been fired for performance reasons.

Cruz was responsible for a big mistake in Week 6 when he missed an obvious false start by Chargers left tackle Russell Okung on a scoring play against the Browns. He didn’t work in Week 7 and according to ESPN, there was no indication Cruz was involved in any off-field incidents or that his firing was in any way disciplinary.

Not baseball related precisely but interesting to see a sport terminating an official during the season for poor performance.

Tuesday, October 16, 2018

In looking at the data overall, the percentage of ejections of nonwhite players exceeds nonwhite players’ league representation — meaning there were more ejections of nonwhite players than league representation would predict occur if ejections were equally as likely to happen to nonwhite as white players. Similarly, ejections of white players fall short of what league representation would predict.

When looked at in totality, ejections of nonwhite players far exceed what league representation predicts (p

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

There’s an evolving opinion in baseball that has come to the forefront once again this month, as it has so often in recent every-pitch-matters, Statcast-tracked Septembers.

The strike zone, many in the game and the Twittersphere say, is not safe in the hands of man.

Such was the uproar after the Rockies’ 4-2 loss to open the series against the Los Angeles Dodgers this past weekend, where Colorado fans ripped the lackluster performance of home-plate umpire Andy Fletcher. The ump ended up face to face with Charlie Blackmon in the ninth inning after ringing up the center fielder on three called strikes that, according to Statcast, were all out of the zone.

Tuesday, August 07, 2018

Baseball consensus holds that umpires only get noticed when they make a bad call. Steve Fields’ career as a major league ump was bookended by two calls that put him in the spotlight. But he went to his grave insisting both were right.

His first momentous call came during the umpires strike of 1979. National League officials, Fields said, told him that crossing a picket line was the only way he’d ever achieve his boyhood dream of making it to the big leagues. He was the oldest minor-league ump in the land at the time, and he believed what he was told. So he crossed the line.

And after all those years in the bushes, Fields suddenly found himself at the highest level of his profession. But because he’d made what his new peers regarded as a deal with the devil to get there, Fields’ run in the major leagues was anything but dreamy. Instead, he encountered seasons of hate and hazing from the veteran members of the very fraternity he’d desperately wanted to join for so long.

“Since 1979, Fields has lived out one of the ugliest episodes in baseball history—the ostracism of the union umpires,” wrote Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post.